"I never thought, the day I hauled you into this town," said Joe, his high rasping voice harmonizing well with his surroundings, like a katydid on a dead limb, "you'd be the man to put the kibosh on 'em and close 'em up like you done. I never saw the bottom drop out of no place as quick as it's fell out of this town, and I've saw a good many go up in my day. The last of them gamblers pulled out a couple of days ago, I hauled his trunk over to the depot. He went a cussin', and he pulled the hole in after him, I guess, on all the high-kickin' this town'll ever do. Well, I ain't a carin'; I've been waitin' my time." "You were wiser than some of them, you knew it would come," Morgan said, glad to meet this bone-gathering philosopher in the desert he had made of Ascalon, and stand talking with him, foot on his hub in friendly way. "Not so much bones," said Joe reflectively, as if he had weighed the possibilities long ago and now found them coming out according to calculation, "as bottles. Thousands of bottles, every boy in this town's out a pickin' up bottles for me. I reckon I'll have a couple of carloads of nothing but bottles. Oh-h-h, they'll be _some_ bones, but the skeleton of this town is bottles. That's why I tell 'em it never will pick up no more. You've got to build a town on something solider'n a bottle if you want it to stand up." "I believe you," Morgan said. "You've worked yourself out of a job. They won't no more need a marshal here'n they will a fish net." Morgan shook his head, got out his pipe, struck a match on the bleached forehead of a buffalo skull in Joe's wagon. "No. I'm leaving town in a week or two--when I make sure it _is_ dead, that they'll never come back and start the games again." "They never will," said Joe, shaking a positive head. "Peden was the guts of this town; it can't never be what it was without him. So you're goin' to leave the country, air you?" "Yes." "Give up that fool notion you had about raising wheat out here on this pe-rairie, heh?" "Gave it up," Morgan replied, nodding in his solemn, expressive way. "Well, you got _some_ sense hammered into you, anyhow. I told you right at the jump, any man that thought he could farm in this here country should be bored for the simples. Look at that range, look at them cattle that's droppin' dead of starvation and want of water all over it. Look at them cattlemen shippin' out thousands of head that ain't ready for market all along this railroad every day. This range'll be as bare of stock by fall, I tell you, as the pa'm of my hand's bare of hairs. Bones? I'll have more bones to pick up than ever was in this country before. Ascalon ain't all that's dead--the whole range's gone up. This'll clean 'em all out. It's the hottest summer and the longest dry spell that ever was." "It couldn't be much worse."